Thursday, 13 September 2012
Sunday, 19 June 2011
Brand New: Solving the Innovation Paradox -- How Great Brands Invent and Launch New Products, Services, and Business Models
Brand New’s revolutionary innovation process is a proven road map you can put to work immediately to create successful new products, services, and business models. Written by leading innovation practitioners, and the coauthor of the bestseller Customers for Life, the authors of this tightly focused, highly entertaining book have nailed the issue perfectly when it comes to successfully introducing anything new.Research shows people like new products and services. Indeed they go out of their way to try to find them. Yet companies are truly terrible at providing new products and services that meet these customers’ needs.
Why are companies so bad at giving customers what they want? Because they lack a simple proven process that makes sure innovation occurs efficiently time after time.
No one knows this better than Mike Maddock and his team at Maddock Douglas, the Agency of Innovation,™ which has worked closely with more than a quarter of Fortune 100.
To solve the innovation paradox, Maddock explains the process his team has used to help the world’s best companies and shows you how to
- Find needs and opportunity in the marketplace
- Come up with significant market insights
- Create compelling communication (using the actual words your customers use) to convince people to try your new creation
What has worked for some of the world’s most successful companies, when it comes to innovation, will work for you. Start putting the lessons of Brand New to work for you…before the competition does.
Price: $29.95
Monday, 23 May 2011
Open Services Innovation: Rethinking Your Business to Grow and Compete in a New Era
The father of “open innovation” is back with his most significant book yet. Henry Chesbrough’s acclaimed book Open Innovation described a new paradigm for management in the 21st century. Open Services Innovation offers a new approach that demonstrates how open innovation combined with a services approach to business is an effective and powerful way to grow and compete in our increasingly services-driven economy. Chesbrough shows how companies in any industry can make the critical shift from product- to service-centric thinking, from closed to open innovation where co-creating with customers enables sustainable business models that drive continuous value creation for customers. He maps out a strategic approach and proven framework that any individual, business unit, company, or industry can put to work for renewed growth and profits. The book includes guidance and compelling examples for small and large companies, services businesses, and emerging economies, as well as a path forward for the innovation industry. “Whether you are managing a product or a service, your business needs to become more open and more inclusive in order to be more innovative. Open Services Innovation will be an invaluable guide to intrepid managers who commit to making that journey.”
—GARY HAMEL, visiting professor, London Business School; director, Management Lab; and author, The Future of Management
“I tore out page after page to share with my leaders. Chesbrough has pioneered an entire rethink of business innovation that’s rich in concept, deeply explained, with tools ready to use in every industry.”
—SCOTT COOK, founder and chairman of the executive committee, Intuit
“Focusing on core competence often tempts managers to keep continuing what succeeded in the past. A far more important question is what capabilities are critical in the future, and Chesbrough shows how to ask and answer these issues.”
—CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN, Robert & Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, and author, The Innovator’s Dilemma
“To thrive, businesses will need to master the lessons of open service innovation. Here is their one-stop guidebook with important lessons clearly and compellingly presented.”
—JAMES C. SPOHRER, director, IBM University Programs World-Wide
“Open Innovation pioneer Henry Chesbrough breaks new ground with Open Services Innovation, a persuasive argument for the power of co-creation in the world of services.”
—TOM KELLEY, general manager, IDEO, and author, The Ten Faces of Innovation, The Art of Innovation
“With his trademark style of beautifully explained examples, Henry Chesbrough shows how open service innovation and new business models can help you escape this product commodity trap and bring you to the next level of competition.”
—ALEX OSTERWALDER, author, Business Model Generation
“Open Services Innovation shows how a business can redefine itself as a service organisation and tap into faster growth through shared innovation.”
—SIR TERRY LEAHY, chief executive, Tesco
“Chesbrough shows how innovating openly with a services mindset can make you a market leader.”
—CHARLENE LI, author, Open Leadership, and founder, Altimeter Group
Case Study: Car2Go from Daimler-Benz
Open Services Innovation provides an alternative way to think about products like cars. It is important to realize that people are usually buying the utility provided by a product and the product itself is only a means to this end. So, with automobiles, one is really obtaining transportation services.
Most of us only drive or utilize our vehicles a small portion of each day (typically less than 10%) and the rest of the time it just sits idle. Yet, we bear 100% (!) of the costs associated with this expensive asset (acquisition, service, parking, insurance, etc.). An Open Services approach seeks to exploit utilization differentials like this to get more value or ROI from underutilized assets. Raising the utilization of a car to even 50% can spread the many costs of owning and operating it over many more hours and people.
Daimler makes the world-renowned Mercedes Benz vehicles and most of them are sold in traditional ways, through dealers. And customers purchase or lease them, using them mostly for themselves.
But Daimler is innovating an alternative way for people to obtain transportation services. Called Car2Go, this service allows customers to pick up a car at a nearby location, use it for as long as they wish, drop it off wherever they like, and they are only charged for the miles they accrue. An intelligent sensor and GPS system allows Daimler to locate their vehicles and show the location of all available vehicles to interested customers online. There is no membership fee to sign up or drop-off fee. This is a very flexible, convenient service.
First tested in Ulm, Germany in 2008, this service was launched in Austin, Texas in 2010. While it is too early to measure success, offering highly flexible transportation services where customers can customize the offering and co-create value is a perfect example of Open Services Innovation (more examples of utilization differential in the book).
Case Study: Mint.com’s Answers Community
The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 traumatized many investors. Even now, after the carnage has subsided, investors remain wary about what to do with their money. And the advice of many “established” brokers and advisors has shown to be unhelpful for many people, creating a hunger for good information about options for saving and investing money.
Mint.com (which is owned by Intuit) is a rapidly growing website that serves this hunger for information and unlike traditional brokerage and financial advisory services, Mint.com takes an open services approach to supplying it. The website has an entire section called Mint Answers that allows users to post questions that are puzzling them, and enables anyone in the Mint.com community to post answers to those questions.
For example, one recent user asked “I have a mortgage that has an interest rate of 5.25%. I have the cash to pay it off. Should I?” To this question, Mint Answers shows three different answers to the question from different people in the community. Each person raised a question that the user needed to consider in making their decision and together these answers were more helpful than any single one. To highlight the best, the user can assign a point for any answer they found to be helpful.
Mint Answers also tracks who the most active contributors of answers to the site are and shows which contributors have accumulated the most points. Notice that all Mint.com is doing is supplying a medium or platform for its viewers to search for and provide information. It costs Mint very little to provide this service (just the cost of the website and tracking the points). The site becomes more valuable the more people use it, as more questions are asked, and as more answers are given.
This example illustrates the idea of using Open Services Innovation to create a platform others build on (more examples in the book).
Price: $34.95
Thursday, 19 May 2011
Service Innovation: How to Go from Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services
Don't ask your customers, "How is OUR service doing?"
Ask them, "How are YOU doing?"
Advance praise for Service Innovation:
"To the CEOs of all service companies I deal with: READ THIS BOOK!" -- Dave Wascha, senior director, Bing Product Management, Microsoft Corporation
"Lance Bettencourt deftly blends his academic and consulting experience to provide an example-rich, readable, practical, and innovative discussion of service innovation." -- Leonard Berry, coauthor of Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic
"Provides the robust framework to design services that unlock growth opportunities for every business." -- Lance Reschke, vice president, Ceridian Corporation
"The tools and guidance in this book will inspire companies, small and large, to create effective and innovative services that are desperately needed." -- Mary Jo Bitner, Ph.D., W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University, and coauthor of Services Marketing: Integrating Customer Focus Across the Firm
"Cracks the code from the fuzzy front end through the complete life cycle of Service Innovation." -- Angelo Rago, division vice president, Global Customer Services, Abbott Medical Optics
"Filled with rich examples of how firms can innovate service through helping customers get jobs done." -- Stephen W. Brown, Ph.D., W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University
"Any leader intent on providing distinctive value to customers must read Service Innovation." -- Michael Reynolds, staff vice president, Commercial Marketing, WellPoint, Inc.
If there’s one truism about the service sector, it's that businesses don't succeed by inventing a better mousetrap; they succeed by finding the best, most cost-effective way to get rid of their customers' mice.
In industries ranging from heavy machinery to health care to financial services to consumer goods, service innovation is helping businesses find new revenue streams--and enhance existing ones--by satisfying their customer's need to get things done.
Few understand this better than Lance Bettencourt, a strategy adviser at Strategyn and a leading educator in management innovation consulting. And in Service Innovation, Bettencourt gives a master's class on the art and science of creating breakthrough service products.
True service innovation demands that you shift the focus away from the solution and back to the customer. To achieve this shift in your business--one that takes you from making educated guesses to building a clear model to guide service innovation--Bettencourt instructs on the finer points of how to rethink your approach to the customer's needs: how the customer defines value in a product or service.
Bettencourt mines nearly 20 years' experience in teaching and advising clients with service- and product-dominant businesses to demonstrate proven ways you can build, streamline, and focus your company's service product innovation processes.
Among the numerous key ideas and practices are:
- Insight on understanding the different types of clients you serve—and how your products deliver value to them
- Ways to design specific frameworks for discovering service innovation opportunities for new, improved, and supplementary service products
- Practical guidance on staying focused on the "fuzzy front end" of service innovation
- The fundamental elements of a winning service strategy
Finding new ways to help people solve problems and get things done is why there are goods and services in the first place. And in Service Innovation, Lance Bettencourt fills a vital need by delivering the essential guide that can put your business on the latest frontier of value creation.
Lance A. Bettencourt (Bloomington, IN) is a strategy adviser with Strategyn, Inc., the pioneer of outcomedriven innovation. Prior to joining Strategyn, he served on the marketing faculties at Arizona State University and Indiana University.
Price: $29.95